Rotten Egg Smell at Faucet: How to Remove

Learn how to get rid of rotten egg smell from the faucet. Find out how a cleaning product from Roto-Rooter eliminates build-up in your faucet and may get rid of a sulphur smell in your water.

LESLIE: Now we’re going to talk plumbing with Jeff in Missouri. What’s going on at your money pit?

JEFF: Hi. I’ve got a mystery for you. I’ve got sulfur smell[1] coming out of my cold water side in my master bath faucet. And it’s – you know, it’s not all the time. It’s just every once in a while. And I don’t know what’s causing that.

LESLIE: Does it happen after, say, you’ve been on vacation and not used the bath for a couple of days or just, you know, intermittently even as you’re using it a lot?

JEFF: Well, I’m (INAUDIBLE) driver so I’m only home like a couple days a week. But it’s not – it’s not every time I’m home. Just every now and then.

TOM: Do you have well water or city water?

JEFF: I’ve got well water.

TOM: Yeah, well that’s probably it. If you don’t run it a lot then you’re going to get that sulfur smell[2] that comes out of it. You say it’s not happening all the time. Perhaps you may not notice it all the time. But if you have well water and you’re not running it, you know, frequently that’s very, very common. You could add a charcoal filtration system to the water and that would eliminate that, but so would just running the water a bit when you turn it on.

JEFF: But this only happens in that one – like in the master bath. It doesn’t happen in the kitchen, the other bathroom or anything else. That’s what the mystery part is.

TOM: Well, is that the farthest fixture away from the main?

JEFF: No, actually the closest.

TOM: Well, I wonder if it’s not the faucet at all. Have you checked the drain?

JEFF: Yeah, I’ve plugged the drains off and thinking it was in the drain, you know, and if I plugged them off and ran the water it’s still coming out of the cold side. I know if it’s the hot side you take the magnesium rod out.

TOM: Right.

JEFF: That helps.

TOM: Right.

JEFF: But the cold side is what throws me for a loop.

LESLIE: There’s a product from Roto-Rooter[3] and it is a sort of liquid enzyme that you mix with warm water and you run it down your drains. And it’s made to sort of degunk and degrease and get rid of any buildup from soap and hair and what-not. But it’s also sort of an odor neutralizer. It might be worth a shot. You put it down the drains once a month and it sort of keeps things running efficiently.

JEFF: Well, alright, we’ll give that a shot. Because our house is only five years old so I didn’t think it would really be that. But we can give that a try and see what happens.

TOM: I’ve also heard that when you assemble the drains if you use an excessive amount of plumber’s putty, that tends to react with a lot of the stuff that goes down a drain. It can get very – a very ranky kind of a smell to it. So it could be something like that as well. It still could be in the drain that’s causing this issue because the water supply is reasonably pure. If you leave it sit for a long time and you run it, it might smell. But it shouldn’t be happening on an inconsistent basis. It’s generally going to happen when you first turn it on and then – everywhere – and then it’s going to slow down after you run it for a minute or two.

JEFF: That’s what the mystery part was. It was just in that master bath.

TOM: Well, let’s start looking more at the drains, Jeff. I think that you’re more likely to find the problem there.